Introduction: Have you ever seen anyone running outside without headphones? It is commonly agreed upon that music affects our physical abilities in many ways. However, most people don't understand the reasons behind these effects. The majority of people would usually try anything to improve their exercise. This study is to scientifically determine the types of music that best improve your physical performance. The results of this study will show statistical data that proves or disproves our hypothesis that music of faster tempo, such as rock or especially techno, will improve athletic performance. We think that this is true because the faster-paced music will generate more motivation and stimulate more energy within the participant and thus psychologically driving them to perform at a faster pace then if they were without music.

The work that has already been done in this field is not very extensive; however, our research has given us a thorough insight on this relatively new field of study. Past studies, such as the Tenenbaum report, have shown that music does not have an effect on the heart rate of an individual. However it does affect the perseverance of the subject and gives them more motivation to exercise longer. In contrast to this theory, other studies such as the Gutfeld report, have asserted that music does affect the heart rate; they have concluded that fast, loud music boosted the heart rate and kept the subjects from exercising longer when listening to slower, “easy-listening” music. The slow stuff, what researchers call “elevator music”, lowered heart rate and allowed the joggers to breathe longer without perceiving them getting any more tired. Although these two reports exhibit two opposing conclusions they both show that music does have some effect on physical aspects of athletic performance. Our experiment will help us determine our position in this binary opposition.

Procedure/Methods: Our experiment is based on a controlled jogging activity under certain types of music. The first step to this process includes finding a suitable amount of persons, who are in good physical shape, to participate in our study. Next it is necessary to ask our subjects to complete a questionnaire that will help us determine a more accurate result from our experiments. The questionnaire will also bring certain factors into our consideration thus helping us to interpret our data properly. This survey will include questions about the person's physical abilities, their daily activities including eating and sleeping habits, and personal information about their age, weight, and sex, and musical preferences. In asking such questions we will be able to further analyze our data to explain certain occurrences or trends within our collected data. After completing this survey, our subjects will partake in a "silent jog” that will allow us to find their personal constant. Then our subject will rest approximately 20 minutes, and proceed to participate in the same activity while listening to an assortment of musical genres with rests in between each activity. All music utilized for the experiment will be fixed at a constant volume level setting. We will measure each of the tests to compare to the constant ('no music' test), and then determine if any change has been discovered. The change in times, or flux, will then be recorded as a positive or negative percentage. The percentages will be accounted for on a personal basis in order to lower the chance of skewed data.In previous reports such as those mentioned above, the types of music that have been used include dance, rock, inspirational, and no music. In our analysis, we will be using a wider variety of music genres to test on our subjects. The musical genres we will use are classical, country, rock, techno, and rap. We believe that these selected genres of music incorporate most of the music listened to by our tested population, which will be primarily young adults (ages 18-21). One song from each genre will be selected and used to test each and every participating subject. These five songs (one from each genre) will be the purest representations of their respective genres. We understand the idea that each genre of music comes in different paces including slow/soothing pace, medium pace, and fast/energetic pace which can significantly affect our results on athletic performance. For example, while classical is often stereotyped as "slow and soothing" music, it is possible to find certain fugues whose tempos are easily comparable to those of techno, and likewise it is possible to come across certain rock music which is slower than what is commonly expected. The focus of this experiment is to study the differences and effects of musical genres, not tempos. Therefore, in order to eliminate this contradictory quandary, we will generalize each genre in accordance with its respective stereotype (e.g. Classical music is, for the most part, considered to be "slow", so a slow classical song will be selected for the experiment) Rock and techno will be generalized as "fast" paced and country and rap will be generalized as "medium" paced.

Along with representing their genres and generalized paces, each selected song will be unknown to the tested subjects. We will choose such songs that are not common and popular in mainstream music of today, but rather unheard of and uncommon to the average listener. We feel that listening to known music will produce slower results in athletic performance as opposed to unknown music because a familiar song would catch more of your brain's attention, in essence be more distractive, by having you to anticipate the upcoming parts of a song. We believe that using unfamiliar music will eliminate a lot of standard error that could occur due to prior knowledge of the composition of the song.

As mentioned above, the activity that will be employed for the experiment is jogging. The process in which we will go about setting up our experiment and collecting our data includes the following steps. First we will measure out a 400 meter circuit on the Western Campus soccer fields. Next we will begin the process of data collection. Our first step is to distribute the preliminary surveys to each of our participants. After completing the silent jog that will provide us with a standard for each individual, we will provide each runner with a music-listening device (i.e. IPod). Before to each run, each runner will be required to begin their music 30 seconds prior to the start of each music trial. After each run is completed and the times are recorded, each runner will be required to complete a post-survey. This survey will help us better understand the personal reaction to each subjects running experience. To better organize each individual’s personal data, the aforementioned surveys and data sheets will be consolidated into a seven-page packet. This data collection of this experiment will last for two days, the 15th and 17th of November. On the first day we will be measuring the initial no-music time as well as the country and techno times. For the second day, we will be measuring the times for the rock, classical and rap music.

The main advantage of jogging over any other type of physical exertion is that our study will appeal to more people and thus be more relevant, since there are clearly more people who run than do other physical activities such as push-ups. It is important for our subjects to understand that they are not to be running at full pace or competing with one another for the faster time. Instead, they should be at a comfortable pace that they can maintain for an extended amount of time. Joggers should not make any conscious efforts to control their jogging pace but should simply go with the flow and let the music guide them like a sail in the wind.